The Age of Reinvention Read Online Free Page A

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    Twenty years later, the bomb explodes, causing internal carnage and mortification. It happens just when Samuel least expects it: at forty years old, as he is mourning the man he should have been; it comes when he no longer possesses anything, when he has already deliberately trashed every chance he’s been given, every ability he had—it’s incredible how much determination someone can put into their self-destruction—and here he is now, staggering to his feet in the middle of the night (he looks like he has a limp), heading straight toward the wall, he’s going to crash into it, but no, he steadies himself, holds his course, rises to the challenge. And here he is now, frozen before Nina, watching her statuesque body lying on the mattress on the floor, stretched out on her back in a mortuary pose; he examines her closed eyes, the purplish eyelids, dark rings from sleepless nights spent watching him get shitfaced, the mass of black hair that she trims herself with little beveled nail scissors, and her opulent white breasts that he can see through the oversized T-shirt—that obsession she has with always wearing clothes a size too large . . . to hide what? She is objectively the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, and every time he looks at her, overtly or surreptitiously, he feels the same shock. He should be used to it by now, after all the time they have been together. You get used to everything, they say—but not that. She is a tall brunette with black-edged eyes, fine features and a stunning, voluptuous body. She has high, rounded buttocks, wide hips, and a narrow waist, legs that are long and amazingly muscled for someone whose main form of exercise is running through the corridors of the RER train station or after her bus. A woman whose every gesture electrifies the most mundane activity. Look at her reading, look at her working. Watching as she enters a room or crosses a street is, in itself, an erotic experience, not because Nina tries to attract the male gaze or wants to be the center of attention—she is too discreet for that, too natural and unambiguous—but because she seems hampered by her perfect physique. There is nothing free about her movements; she can’t let her hair down, put on a pair of shorts and a low-cut tank top, and go out for a walk because, if she does, if she acts spontaneously, lets loose her sensuality, she will be whistled at, checked out, heckled, and hit on. And for a girl like her, so detached from the iniquitous laws of attraction, so indifferent to the artificial physics of seduction that rule social life, this is unbearable. It is clear, watching her, that she has no idea what to do with that hypersexualized body of hers, which magnetizes everyone around her, no matter what she does, filling the mind of every passing male with just one desire: to possess her. God should have provided a user manual with a body like that. Such beauty is a prison. Faced with her, no one thinks they are in the same league—and it’s true: no one is. She is not the kind of girl to fuck on the first date, or even the second. Not that she’s especially prudish—her moral compass does not always point north—but she is all too aware of the devastating effects of her impressive, alienating beauty. And the truth is that she is the one who is most impressed, most alienated by her beauty. So she ties her long, smooth, dark hair in a ponytail, and that is the best thing to do. True, she has just turned forty; she is now entering the climacteric phase; she knows that soon, in a few months or a few years—within a very short, and rapidly shortening, period of time (a time she does not fear the passing of, because age, she thinks, will calm the agitation that her presence always creates whenever she enters a room)—men will no longer turn around and stare. Samuel is watching out for that moment. With a woman like her, you live